… but receives a good response from Andrew Mwenda, who argues that the debate is misplaced, and calls for more trade to help the continent rise out of poverty. He makes an interesting point on the alleged ‘lack of conditionality’ debate: ‘arguments that Chinese aid is good or bad because it does not have conditionality is misplaced. Conditionality has consistently failed to work. A lot of studies on Africa have demonstrated this. What China is doing in Africa is not changing direction, but offering more of the same’. [both via Africa Unchained]

And Paolo de Renzio from ODI jumps into the debate, asking a simple, yet powerful question: ‘Amidst all the noise, however, the most deafening roar is that of China’s silence. Its silence on the vision it has for a different world order. Should the international community engage with China in dialogue at this higher level, rather than focus narrowly on good governance in Africa?’

Laura Rozen quotes NPR: ‘The US is going to let 7,000 of the two million Iraqi refugees into the US. By contrast, Syria has taken in one million Iraqi refugees, but now says it can take no more. Forty thousand Iraqis are fleeing Iraq every month’.

Economy and International Development

Much to the horror of debt-relief campaigners, the Guardian and the BBC report on a British High Court ruling, which allows British Virgin Islands-based Donegal International to sue Zambia for a $42m repayment for a debt that the African nation owed and which the company purchased at less than $4m (£2m). Oxfam urges campaigners to send an angry message to the company’s CEO.

Europe/EU

Edward Lucas lashes out not once, but twice from the Economist’s pages at Poland’s ‘pig-headed’ government led by the Kaczynski twins, depicted as ‘vengeful, paranoid, addicted to crises, divided and mostly incompetent‘. An unusually politically-savvy position for an Economist correspondent to take, given Poland has taken in a record $14.7 billion in foreign investment last year, and the economy is growing at almost 6% a year.

Mariann Fischer-Boel starts warming up to her new blog-toy, reporting from her recent US trip where she discussed farm subsidies and the future of the WTO Doha negotiations: ‘My discussions in Washington showed that the Farm Bill will be written very much with domestic concerns in mind. DOHA does not seem to be high on the agenda in farm bill discussions. This is a very different approach to ours, where we reform first and then look to lock these reforms into a WTO agreement‘. Is my euro-speak rusty, or is the pot calling the kettle black?

And finally, for those of you who are wondering what happened to the oneseat campaign (which collected over 1m signatures to try and stop 200 million euros being spent every year to move the European Parliament between Brussels/Belgium and Strasbourg/France), read Nanne’s entry on trading seats and proposals to try and woo France’s bruised ego on the subject!